Festbier 1.0

I had tasted few festbiers before going to Munich in September 2019. I think Weihenstephaner was the only one. Instead, I drank a lot of marzen, probably the most common version of the Oktoberfest style beer here in the USA. I remember really liking the Augustiner and Hofbrau versions (pretty sure I also had Paulaner from a can purchased at Aldi in Munich), so I wanted to emulate them in my own beer. I recall them tasting like a heftier helles, which is how the beer is described. This was the second beer I brewed following the tiny helles. 

Aroma: all pilsner malt. maybe a little corn. Tettnanger hops are pretty fruity in flavor but don't really pick those up in the aroma; maybe just a hint. Tettnanger hops are from 2014. I was going to make a "Dragonmead" Tripel recipe I found on homebrewtalk but never got around to it. I held on to the hops and finally used them. They still smelled very fresh. 

Appearance: gold. pretty clear with gelatin. 

Flavor: In terms of malts, pretty much all pilsner. It has a fair amount of Munich malt and just a touch of melanoidin, but this is all pilsner. The Tettnanger hops are pretty fruity. Good body, evenly balanced between bitterness and sweetness. I've had a stray thought here and there that it's almost too sweet, but mostly it's very quaffable. 

9/6/21: This was overall a good beer and one thta I would drink again. 

5 gallon recipe:

8.5 lb Pilsner (Weyermann)

1 lb Munich light

.25 lb Melanoidin

Wyeast 2633 Octoberfest blend

Festbier 2.0 / helles brew day and tasting

10/4/2020:

When I first sampled the first festbier, I noticed it was pretty fruity. I wondered if it was due to a fermentation issue or the hops. In doing research, I think the fruitiness came from the Tettnanger hops. I did not desire or anticipate such a fruity flavor, so I decided I would brew another version.

This one has slightly more grain and no melanoidin. And it has Hersbrucker hops. And just a touch of Galena to up the bitterness. 

The actual brewing went very smoothly, but I missed my numbers. First, I had just a bit over 5 gallons of wort post-boil. I attribute this to my propane running low midway through the boil. So at least for a few minutes it was not actually boiling. Second, I believe I saw a fair amount of uncrushed grain. This is the second of two sacks of grain I bought at the same time at the same shop. The first beer had that issue as well.

So, instead of 1.058, I ended up at 1.052. This festbier will likely be a helles instead. That's not a big problem, since I love helles, but I don't like not achieving what I set out to do. Beautiful beer though. Nice golden, clear wort. Should make for a tasty helles or festbier or whatever I want to call it!

I also kegged the club Oktoberfest today and added gelatin. It is now in the fridge conditioning. 

3/23/2021:

This second festbier has been in the keg for several months now. Not sure what went wrong, but it just doesn't have the delicious grainy, bready flavor I associate with pilsner malt. I used Avangard pils this time instead of Weyermann. There are a few different possibilities. Either Avangard pils is not as I remember it, there was a fermentation issue, or I was given the wrong malt. I tend to think I was given pale malt instead, since this beer doesn't really have any off flavors and based on other blog posts, Avangard pilsner malt has a similar flavor to Weyermann's.

In the end, it's just not that good of a beer. It really reminds me of Budweiser. It has that similar sweet blandness. I used the same malt in my club Oktoberfest, which had a similar blandness.

8/4/2021:

This beer is still hanging around nearly a year later, which says something about what I think of it. It looks good and smells pretty good, a kind of sweet, bready, malty aroma. But it just doesn't taste that good. It's bland and maybe overly bitter too. On the plus side, it looks great in my new Bierstadt glass that I just got over the weekend in Denver!

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8.5 lb pilsner

1.75 lb light Munich

Wyeast Oktoberfest blend

Mandarina Bavaria Pilsner

I think I was inspired by a commercial beer, the name of which escapes me. Plus I wanted to play around with Mandarina Bavaria hops, which I had never used. 100% Weyermann pils. Wyeast oktoberfest blend. 5 gallons. I think I used some filtered water from a special tap I have in my house.

Didn't love this beer at first, and I still don't, technically. It has a certain rough bitterness. But the bitterness that is there balances nicely with the malt sweetness. It's also pretty refreshing on a hot day.

Brewed 11/1/20. Kegged 11/17/20.

9 lbs Weyermann Pils

14.2 g Galena hops (15.6 AA) at 60 minutes

2 oz Mandarina Bavaria hops at 5 minutes

43.49 IBU

Tiny Helles tasting

Kegged just two weeks ago, this beer is really hitting its stride. It's crisp and super clear with the aid of gelatin. I've been drinking it steadily and sadly the keg is about empty. That's sort of the downside of 5-gallon batches; by the time the beer is really drinking good, it's nearly gone. I suppose I could wait a little bit longer before drinking it, but I can never resist sampling after kegging a new beer. And it tastes pretty good, I'll just start drinking it, like I did with this one. 

When it was brand new, it had a much stronger grainy, bready flavor. But as it's cleared up, the bready/grainy character is more of a background flavor. No apparent hop flavor, so it's all German pilsner malt. This beer finished at 1.010-12, so based on a 1.040 OG, it's under 4% ABV, perhaps substantially so. The great thing is that you can drink a lot of these and not get overly tipsy. The beer has a fairly moderate body, despite being such a small beer. It's not thin and there are no weird flavors from the touch of chiller discharge water that ended up in the kettle. Aroma is somewhat low, but there are hints of that bready graininess. Overall, this is a great beer and served as a great warmup for the yeast, which has been used in additional beers. Speaking of the yeast, 2633 Oktoberfest, I'm not sure I pick up anything unique about it compared to other lager yeasts I've used. 

Tiny smash Helles

Right before the lockdown hit my community, I rushed to the homebrew store to buy some grain. I intended to try making a Kolsch-like beer with US-05 yeast, but unfortunately I never got around to brewing it. Since then, my kegs have emptied and with plans to make an Oktoberfest beer, I decided I would use this grain to make a small Helles-like lager. 

I went to two different shops looking for a German lager strain, and the only one I could find is Wyeast 2633 Oktoberfest. I had intended to use Wyeast 2308 as I had good luck with it two years ago. I would have settled for 2124 as well, but both were out of stock. I've never used 2633 before and could not find a lot of information about it, but some posts I read on forums indicated it works well.

This is the first beer in my new house and the first non-Pickwick beer I've ever made. Overall, things went pretty smoothly, but I did have a few mishaps. The output end of my wort chiller somehow got in the wort for a second, so that increased the volume. I think I ended up with 5.5 gallons and an OG of 1.040 instead of 1.043. My wort chiller also came apart after one of the clamps evidently loosened. So I had to take it out and put it back together. 

In the end, this beer is a warmup for some Oktoberfest beers I'll be brewing in the coming weeks. Wort tastes pretty good. A little thin. But a good grainy, bready flavor. 

Recipe:

7.5 lbs Weyermann Pils

1 oz Hersbrucker at 60 minutes

2633 Oktoberfest yeast

Brulosophy Tiny Bottom Pale Ale

I rarely brew other people's recipes as I like the feeling of creativity and anticipation I feel when I write and brew my own. However, sometimes it pays to follow something tried and true, as sometimes things don't work out as intended. I scaled down my recipe manually one Saturday afternoon while sitting outside the homebrew shop. I didn't want to make it too complex with weird amounts, so I ballparked it. It's pretty close to the original. I got the ingredients at the brew shop in ozark one Saturday afternoon and tried to quickly scale the recipe out in the parking lot using the brewers friend app. I tried to manually scale the recipe to 5 gallons as best I could while also trying not to make it too complicated for the employee selecting, weighing, and crushing the grains for me. I have some old Fuggles on hand, but decided it’d be best to purchase fresh hops. So I got an ounce of Fuggles and Perle, a hop I’ve never used before. 

I read about this beer a pretty long time ago and somehow it got back on my radar earlier tis year. It sounded like an easy drinking pale ale, which is what I've been wanting to drink lately. Don’t really remember how I decided to add this one to the rotation. I’ve been watching a lot of homebrewing videos lately though, and one channel I subscribe to, clawhammer supply, made this beer. And I had read about it on brulosophy’s site. Anyway, here we are. 

It's the fourth in a series of beers I brewed this past winter, all using a single sachet of US-05. The original recipe calls for a different strain - San Diego Super yeast or something - but I was already using US-05, and it has never let me down.

Routine brew day, although I mixed up some hop additions. I substituted galena for magnum. And the original recipe calls for 1.5 oz or so total, but I had purchased two 1 oz hops packets and didn't feel like keeping around just .5 oz, so I put it all in.

Appearance: Golden, amber. Pretty clear without use of gelatin, just time. Off white, foamy head.

Aroma: Malt. No discernible hops. Bready?

Flavor: moderate body, good balance. Light bitterness. It had some earthy, herbal, noble hop flavor early on but those seem to have faded. It's mostly malt now, with maybe a hint of that herbal flavor in the background. Vienna malt is pretty prominent.

Overall: Very solid beer. I'm glad I brewed it. I like beers that I can drink without being overwhelmed with sweetness, bitterness, or alcohol. This strikes the perfect balance of all three.

Brew date: 2/1/2020

Keg date: 2/16/2020

OG 1.049-50

FG 1.010

~5.25 gallons

US-05

Mishmash brown ale

Apparently the definition of mishmash is a "confused" mixture. While this is definitely a mixture, it wasn't confused. I chose the ingredients deliberately in an effort to make something resembling a brown ale. In any event, this beer is made up of several leftover malts I've had around for quite some time. A brown ale sounded good, so I thought I'd pull together what I had and make one.

Nearly all of the malts are pretty old, probably at least a year for most of them, except the 2-row, which makes up the bulk of the grain bill. The chocolate malt is really old though. I bought five pounds of it from a shop in Fenton, MO in June 2014 and have used it here and there over the years, but I still have a lot left.

I like to experiment with beers to see what I can come up with. So that's what I did here. A little of this, a little of that, let's see what we get. I did do some research to try to stay within the guidelines of a brown ale; not to keep it within style per se, but just to make sure it tastes like a brown ale. For example, I reviewed an "averagely perfect" brown ale at Beer Advocate's homebrew forum, which has some ingredient overlap with my recipe.

Appearance: Deep brown with ruby on the edges and if you hold it to the light. Good clarity without use of gelatin. Light tan head.

Aroma: Roastiness. Coffee. Chocolate.

Flavor: Dark bread. Coffee. Dark chocolate. Modest hop bitterness, but definitely some astringency from roasted/kilned malts, but it's not unpleasant. Good carbonation. Fairly light body, but not thin. A good balance between sweetness and bitterness. Not overly dry and not sweet. No discernible hop flavor. I wonder if the old chocolate malt changes the flavor. Maybe kind of a dark fruit, oxidized flavor? I feel like when I've used fresher chocolate malt in the past, including in a January 2018 stout, there was a fresher, chocolatier flavor. Something to keep in mind for next time I guess. The flavor has sort of changed over time. I think I got a little of the brown malt when I first started drinking this beer, but it's completely lost now and I only taste the chocolate malt.

If I made this beer again, I'd probably cut back the chocolate malt to six ounces and maybe use less special roast too, but I think that malt is supposed to add "toasty" and "biscuity" flavors, so the heavy roasty, astringent flavor probably isn't coming from that. Another thing I'd do is use fresher chocolate malt. It was generally okay in this beer, but fresher malt would probably enhance the beer.

Brew date: 1/22/2020
Keg date: 2/1/2020
OG 1.052
FG 1.008
~5 gallons
US-05

Recipe:
5.5 lb 2 row
2 lb German pale ale
8 oz pale chocolate
8 oz caramunich I
8 oz brown malt
7 oz special roast
1.9 oz caramel 120

1 oz Willamette hops (4.2 AA) at 60 minutes for 17.42 IBU

Civil Life Rye Pale Ale clone attempt

Civil Life Rye is one of my favorite beers. It's a great balance of malt and hops in a pretty low ABV beer. I had it recently and decided I would try to make it again. I made a previous attempt in 2014 but for some reason decided to add Citra hops, which made it nothing like the real thing.

Civil Life is pretty coy about the recipe details, listing the ABV and IBU. Malts are listed but not the quantities/percentages, nor the lovibond. The hops are simply describe as "American C-hops." The term "American" precedes the hops and the word yeast, presumably meaning the beer has american yeast as well, but they don't say the strain. In short, they give us clues but not a lot to work with.

I came up with a recipe and brewed it on January 14. I racked the wort onto the yeast cake from the Southern Passion rye pale ale. Fermentation took off quickly and was done within a matter of days. I kegged it on January 22.

First off, this is a tasty beer and I like it, but it's nowhere near the real thing and quite far off in terms of the pale ale category, as well. Though the ABV is fine for a pale ale, and the bitterness too, there's just too much punchy hop flavor and not enough background malt flavor to really make this a pale ale. Instead it borders on IPA and could probably be deemed a session IPA. Surprisingly it doesn't drink like one of those watery session IPAs that were popular about four or five years ago. Maybe that's due to the pound and a half of flaked and malted rye. It has a good body, maybe moderate, maybe chewy, but isn't sweet. It was fermented with the yeast cake from the Southern Passion pale ale (US-05).

So, where did I go wrong with my beer? Perhaps the most obvious problem before drinking is the color. It's yellow (and pretty clear; no gelatin on this one, just time), whereas the real thing is "deep amber." The only malt listed on the web site that could give the beer any color is caramel, so I will need a higher lovibond caramel malt next time, maybe 120. In addition, the real thing has a slight toasty/roast flavor in the background, which almost reminds me of brown malt, and i know Civil Life uses it a lot in their beers. But that's not listed among the ingredients. Again, there's just too much hop flavor here and not enough malt and the real thing is almost entirely malt.

Changes for next time? A darker color, achieved through caramel malt I guess. And way less hops. Maybe an ounce of Chinook? What gives it that sort of roasty/toasty flavor? Maybe a darker caramel malt? Mine does have a slight crackery malt flavor in the background at times, though hops is definitely the dominant flavor. Overall, mine is a tasty beer. Cheers!

OG 1.043
FG 1.007-1.008
~5 gallons
US-05

Southern Passion Rye Pale Ale

Continuing with my trend of easy drinking beers, this is another moderate alcohol pale ale using Southern Passion hops, which I got at the Anheuser Busch hop giveaway in St. Louis in November. I had never heard of these hops before. Since I have a lot, maybe 3/4 of a pound, I thought I would use them in this beer. Apparently they're a South African variety.  AB purportedly bought a large amount and for a time maybe even all of them, per an article, which sort of prevented other breweries from obtaining them.

AB provided specs indicating the alpha acids are between 6% and 8%, at least for this crop. However, research indicates they can be as high as 12. I wonder if the AA is higher than 6-8%, because this is a fairly bitter beer. It's also a pretty dry beer, so there isn't much sweetness to balance out the bitterness. This beer may simply have too much hops, also. At four ounces for a five gallon batch of pale ale, that really may be pushing it. I recall when session IPAs were popular that they were pretty watery, even though they were sometimes around 5% ABV. It seems to me that a high quantity of hops in even a 5% beer can really alter the sweetness perception, making a beer taste very dry, bitter, and a little watery. If I made this beer again, I would use maybe only two ounces instead of four. Of course, it seems carbonation can alter a beer, as well. This beer was and may remain a bit over-carbonated. Hydrometer samples post-fermentation were sweeter and the hop flavor more pungent and fruitier.

The pungent fruitiness seems to have diminished. I have a hard time describing hops with words other than generic fruit. Maybe orange, particularly the bitter rind part. Aroma is somewhat modest in this beer, but is generally fruity.

I like rye beers, so this beer has some rye malt, which was pretty old actually. I got it three or four years ago and it's been sitting in a closet since. Incidentally, I think the rye "spice" flavor is a myth. It's a mishmash beer, too, with various types of malt, including 2 row, Munich, and German pale ale. No evident malt in the aroma. Some light malt flavors in the taste, maybe a hint of crackery malt. A touch of astringency as well, perhaps owing to the hop bitterness. It looks great, good golden/amber color, with good clarity from gelatin. Overall, it's a good but not great beer, and not really one I think of first when I consider which beer to have. It's also a reminder to be careful with recipe design. With a touch more sweetness, less bitterness, and maybe a maximum of two ounces of hops, this would be a better beer. Cheers!

OG 1.048-50
FG 1.008-10
~5.25 gallons
US-05

Resilience IPA

I'm tired of hazy and juicy; NEPA; NEIPA; imperial; and adjuncts. I want to go back to basics, like traditional American pale ales and west coast IPAs; bitters; and European lagers. This of course has been a theme of this blog for quite some time. So I really took to Resilience IPA. It was one of my favorite beers of late 2018 and early 2019. I think I bought three six packs. It's a great beer for a great cause and it also tasted great. It was on my mind again recently when I made the APA. So I decided to make Resilience my next beer. Thanks to Sierra Nevada for making the recipe available. I brewed it about a month ago and it's been in the keg for several weeks.

Appearance: Deep golden, amber. Some chill haze that fades as the beer warms. No gelatin in this beer yet. It has cleared with time, but still has a slight chill haze.

Aroma: I think I'm getting something from the yeast, and it is not very pleasant. Gross description, I know, but a burp sort of has a yeasty taste that follows the aroma. This happened with the pale ale too and I have decided I won't be using BRY-97 anymore. It was free so I thought I'd give it a try, but next time I think I'll just use US-05, which has never let me down. Anyway, the aroma is almost rubbery. Some research indicates a rubbery or plastic flavor can be due to infections or chloramine in tap water. I've been brewing with my tap water for years without any issues like that. Infections have been a problem at various times over the years and the lagers I made this year were off (with the exception of the IPL). I think it could be the yeast. Update: I wrote this draft a few weeks ago. Since then the plastic-like aroma has sort of diminished, but the yeast aroma hangs around.

Flavor: Follows the aroma. A touch of that off flavor/aroma, followed by centennial and Cascade hops. Citrusy, maybe a little piney, but maybe that's just because that's a typical flavor descriptor for these types of hops.

Overall: It's an okay beer to drink. It's way better than some of the worst I've made over the years, but it's still disappointing. I imagined this would taste like the resilience I had last year, and it sort of resembles it, but the yeasty flavor really detracts from the finished product.

A note on canning. I canned this and the pale ale, about three six packs each. It was fun, but at 50 cents a can, I probably won't be doing it again soon. I thought for sure friends and relatives would be more impressed by the cans, but they didn't remark on them too much. I do like how they're easy to fill and seam and cleaning the work space and the device is pretty quick. I like how they eliminate oxygen and clear up keg space, since beer is in the cans and not in the kegs, which in theory would allow me to brew and keg more often. It's also very cool to have cans of my own beer. But the expense of the cans limits the viability of doing this on a larger scale. The only way to get cans at a reasonable price would be to buy a whole palate, but I certainly don't want to commit to so many cans and I don't have space for that many. I doubt the club wants to store so many cans either. So, for now I anticipate using the canner only occasionally.

Brew Day (Night): classic pale ale

Looking back over the six years I've been brewing, I can think of few times I brewed a good old classic American pale ale in the vein of Sierra Nevada's. I brewed Northern Brewer's Sierra Madre kit in late 2013 and once made a Maris Otter/Cascade smash beer. Otherwise, I've made farmhouse ales, IPAs (lots of them), some English styles, and lagers. But lately I've had a taste for more modest, yet tasty styles, including the aforementioned lagers. I've had enough of the "juicy" and "hazy" IPA and actually getting bored with those is not hard to do given I've had more than a few mediocre versions. So, for my drinking tastes lately, it's back to basics, like West Coast IPAs and C-hop pale ales.

That's what was on deck for this beer: a straightforward, yet flavorful American Pale Ale. I helped run a homebrew competition on Saturday, reward for which from the homebrew shop owner hosting the event was the option to take a yeast packet from a selection for free. I think I saw some Belgians, US-05, 34/70, etc. I also saw BR-97, a yeast I was until then unfamiliar with. I figured I'd take it if it was still there after everyone had picked through the various items up for grabs. It was still there when I left so I chose it.

I'd been meaning to brew an APA like this for awhile, but many times I'd end up changing the hops and increasing the amounts. Not this time. I went for 10 pounds 2-row and .5 lb Crystal 90, I believe, but the shop did not have that particular malt, so I chose 120 instead. For hops, I chose to use the leaf cascades I got for free at the Anheuser Busch hop giveaway I attended last December. I had vacuum sealed them, so they smelled very fresh.

Brewing was uneventful, aside from losing a piece of my wooden stir spoon in the boil. I also ran out of propane just before the boil, which necessitated a trip to Walmart in the rain for a replacement (I only own one tank). And the hose was not properly connected to the wort chiller, so when I turned on the water, it sprayed out of the connection and I think some got in the kettle.

Other details: I mashed in the 150s. My mash tun - an igloo cooler - has various temperature zones, so it's hard to tell the exact temperature. Chilled to around 85-88 or so, and left the kettle outside in the cold while I sanitized equipment. I'm sure pitching temperature was much lower. I squeezed the hop bag to get as much wort out of the leaf hops as possible. I ended up with about 5.25-5.33 gallons, and still managed to overshoot the estimated OG that Brewer's Friend gave me (1.055). The OG was 1.056-58. Nice golden color, a little lighter than I anticipated given the higher lovibond of the crystal malt.

This brew took almost six hours, though I did manage a tip to the gym and a trip to Walmart, and overall I took my time. I pitched the yeast around 10:15 and started reading about my chosen yeast. I was already aware that the yeast is known for a hefty lag time, but was surprised to read that some brewers had 72 hour+ lags. I was pleasantly surprised to see some minor airlock activity by morning and a creamy layer of krausen by lunch. As of the evening airlock is bubbling regularly.

So far this is shaping up to be a successful brew. Hopefully it is. I'm already planning to reuse this yeast on, maybe, the Resilience IPA and an English Mild recipe I saw on homebrewtalk today.

Update: the yeast took off quickly. Fermentation was well under way by lunch time the following day. I kegged the beer on November 6, eight days later. I was pretty confident that it was going to taste good, since the hydrometer sample was pretty good, but some of the initial pours tasted a little off. I think it was just a large amount of yeast. I have since carbonated the beer and clarified with gelatin. The gelatin is still working, so it's not crystal clear just yet, but getting there.

Taste is citrus, pine, orange, whatever Cascade tastes like. There's just a little alcohol burn in the aftertaste, but not overwhelming or unpleasant. Not overly bitter. It has a generic malt sweetness but no real discernible malt flavors. The beer was also a little heavy at first, and I wondered if that was due to the higher gravity and thus greater ABV (OG: 1.056-58 to FG: 1.010 = ~ 6% ABV). That seems to have gone away as the beer has cleared up.

Aroma: Pretty faint cascade hops.

Appearance: Just what I was going for. Light amber, honey. Good clarity.

Overall: Seems to be a successful beer. Everything seems in balance, including bitterness, hop flavor, and malt sweetness.

Recipe: 5 gallons, 10 pounds 2-row, .5 pound Crystal 120. 1 oz cascade hops at 50, 1 at 10, .4oz at flameout (because that's what I had left).